Wayback Machine BETA – Go Back in Time

Have you ever wondered how Google.com looked back in the days when it was just a pet project of Larry & Sergey? Well the snapshot you see below is taken on 11 November 1998. Now you can compare this with the current Google.com home and see what has changed. Well to me it seems like nothing much has changed in last 12 years other than just a cleaner UI and a better logo.

The Internet Archive has recently released a new BETA version of Wayback Machine that lets you go back in time and search for any website and get an idea of how it used to look back then.

But the Wayback Machine has always existed, then what is so cool about this Beta? Well a lot has changed, for instance now you can access a simple version of WayBack Machine directly from the url: http://waybackmachine.org/

They have also added a couple of new features like:

Two buttons at the home page that lets you go directly to the latest available archived version of the site or show a list of all archived versions.

When browsing through old archived pages, they have added a Calendar Interface that highlights the days on which the page has been changed and a new snapshot has been recorded. It even shows you the number of times a particular page has been crawled in it’s entire life time.

It takes you a step further and presents a clickable histogram showing when pages were crawled.

If you move your cursor over any day it will also show you how many pages were captured that day and the exact time(s) the crawler came to visit the site.

They have a much detailed FAQ page that has some more info about this service. If you are however looking to search for something on the entire web archive and not just a specific website, you can check out the BETA version of Internet Archive by going directly to: http://beta.archive.org/